THE deadline for the registration of stateless children in Sarawak has been brought forward to December 1 while the final cut for others must be sorted out by next September.

The original deadline was December 31.

Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said in Kuching today that he had directed the special task force to issue the birth certificates and MyKads to all bona fide children by December 1.

The special task force is headed by Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Joseph Entulu, and co-ordinated in the state by Sarawak Minister for Welfare, Women and Community Wellbeing Fatimah Abdullah.

These stateless children are mostly in rural Sarawak where transportation difficulties and the exorbitant cost of getting to the nearest National Registration Department (NRD) office have discouraged parents from reporting births and applying for identification cards.

Deaths in rural areas are mostly not reported.

The problem of not reporting births or registering for the MyKad is most acute among the semi-nomadic Penan tribe, who lives in the remote mountainous interiors of Limbang, close to the Sarawak-Kalimantan border.

Zahid said applicants that met all legal requirements should be given their birth certificates or MyKads immediately.

He said he had also directed the Sarawak NRD director to form a special team to work with Entulu’s task force to speed up the issuance process.

“We are serious in tackling this problem which has been going on for far too long,” he said in a media conference at the end of his one-day working visit to Kuching.

“There are still many Sarawakians without birth certificates and MyKad.”

It was reported that the task force identified at least 2,000 stateless children in the state.

There are also cases of adults having no birth certificates or citizenship status.

Without birth certificates or MyKads, these rural children cannot register for school and when they reached adulthood, cannot be considered for a job.

Sarawak earlier this year enhanced its outreach programme by going directly to schools to receive and approve applications for identification documents by stateless pupils.

The first school to be reached was the rural primary school, SK Batu Balai in Sebauh, Bintulu which only has 45 pupils.

Fatimah said the school’s headmaster had requested for the programme to be conducted there and the task force agreed to do it since the number of stateless pupils at the school was “quite substantial”.

The four-day programme there was jointly conducted by the state Education Department and the NRD.

The issue of children without proper documentation goes back to before 2008 when the federal government set up its first task force to tackle the problem. – November 5, 2017.